Posts will be irregular from now until the New Year - check back for updates, but we can't promise the usual daily dose. A very happy Christmas and New Year to all things readers - both print and online. Next year will see, finally, the publication of things17-18. In the meantime, check our archive and see what's new.

Anti-development acronyms. Apparently the next stage up from NIMBY (Not In My Back yard), is NOTE (or even NOPE). A NUMBY is somewhat more paranoid, but our favourite has to be the BANANA (Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anyone). Via Grayblog. Another new word: gerbilling ('Gerbil v,i To rotate inside a monowheel due to excessive braking or acceleration. [f. E, From ability of gerbils to run right round the inside of hamster wheels due their greater speed'). Found on this page of monowheel designs (via me-fi).

We like this. SA+BM’s (apologies for getting the name wrong before) winning entry for the Cedric Price Memorial competition, held by the Architect's Journal, a series of designs for 'beautifully crafted, scaled rubber stamps' that 'introduce themes of time, interval and periods of usefulness into almost any idealistic architectural drawing, which often show scant regard for the fourth dimension, time.' In the spirit of Price himself, we offer a pdf of the full set for you to download and enliven your own architectural creations.

We really meant to write something on Unknown Quantity, the exhibition curated (and conceived) by Paul Virilio and held at the Fondation Cartier earlier in the year. As usual, time ran out. Luckily there's a very comprehensive site to visit. Virilio was previously concerned with speed and impermanence; here he is dealing with failure, the failure of fragile machinery, or the failure of our fragile existence to deal with nature’s occasional rages. Visit the museum of accidents, already outdated by fresh catastrophe, natural, industrial, environmental and deliberate.

The extraordinary animation of the public street, the crowd swarming on the sidewalks, the carriages on the pavement, and the boulevard's trees waving in the dust and light-never has movement's elusive, fugitive, instantaneous quality been captured and fixed in all its tremendous fluidity as it has in this extraordinary, marvelous sketch that Monet has listed as Boulevard des Capucines

The Cooker is the online home of artist Jake Tilson. I’ve long been a fan of Tilson’s work - he’s been working with the ‘found’ aesthetic, be it fonts, discarded cassette tapes, receipts, flyers, printed ephemera, for many years before it became a staple of the web. In fact, he’s been online since 1994 (more site history). Our first encounter was via the densely layered travelogue Atlas, Issue 4 (now hugely, and gratifyingly, expensive). You can buy his new book, 3 Found Fonts, online - it's highly recommended for fans of vanishing street graphics, typographical detective stories and all forms of signs and mark making. No relation, but Public Lettering has a similar eye for street graphics.

As if to confirm the theory that everyone, somewhere, has a web page devoted to them, we've been revisiting old, favourite bands: Loop, Primitives (particularly slick), Th’ Faith Healers (I might even have been at this gig, although God knows what year it was). How things have changed in the mp3 age - would these bands have prospered or floundered if the hard-to-find status of their records was negated by downloads and a more pluralist market? Related: Apple are the Marketer of the Year, over at Advertising Age, thanks to their iPod campaign. Interestingly, this isn't about a huge marketing spend (estimated at a mere $9m on iPod during the first eight months of 2003), but about getting iPod-related stories in the press – some 6,000 of them in the last year.

Assorted miscellany. Simon le Bon has a book club / a photolog by Romi / great 'then and now' images at a secret smile / we’ve linked We Snap City before, but we clearly weren't looking hard enough. Take another look at that template. Look familiar? Oh well. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery (cliché-google (a clooglé?)), and it’s nice to see someone else struggle with the hacky css and obvious formatting problems. Related: Pirated sites, via Brainstorms & Raves.

Lemuria, at a later period. A map of Rotterdam-based art and installation / Socialfiction weblog, with links to the geographer and astronomer Athanasius Kircher / Tangents, 'the home of unpopular culture'. Complete with unpopular, a weblog and gallery. Unpopular culture never remains unpopular for long. It usually seeps into the mainstream, or remains on the sidelines and becomes deified (Shrine Zine, a new format fanzine. Issue one out now / vast gallery of Siouxsie Sioux).

Absolutely all you could ever want to know about THX-1138, George Lucas's cult movie (including audio clips). The trivia page reveals the usual cross-pollination of references between the man's various movies ('When Han and Luke go to the detention area to rescue the princess, Luke explains their presence as a "prisoner transfer from cellblock 1138."). Pages devoted to single films are like DVD bonus discs. One of our favourites is the 2001 Internet Resource Archive, which has excellent screen captures. Also related: Exploring Dystopia, essays and more on fictional representations of dystopic futures (via me-fi).

General randomness today, I'm afraid. Process mapping via tube, yet another implementation of the Harry Beck classic, this time helping your business plan ahead (via Lost Shot) / Burgher Deluxe, investigates two books touting the supposed benefits of conspicious consumption, and how 'emotional engagement' is the new buzzword in branding. (we also learn that '83 percent of pet owners call themselves "Mommy" or "Daddy" when talking to their pets (up from 55 percent in 1995')).

Robot-tastic, the International Robot Exhibition 2003 ('from manufacturing to personal life'). Developments in robotics are also covered at Better Humans, which has an array of alarming future-medicine headlines ('Modified Pig Kidneys Keep Monkeys Alive', etc.). We were fascinated by 'Building a Home for Immortals', or how proponents of so-called Radical Life Extension have to face cultural and political obstacles, and not just the more obvious scientific ones. We learned that the Immortality Institute is 'an organization whose mission is to "conquer the blight of involuntary death"'. It's but a short click from here to our friends at Alcor, providing cryonics services since 1972 (gallery). The 'immortality movement' always reminds us of a baby hurling toys out of its pram, bawling so much about the unfairness of life and the inevitability of death that they actually forget to live.

Staying in the future: Beijing vs Blade Runner. Not sure if I totally agree with the premise – that Beijing is soon to be a Blade Runner-style metropolis. Admittedly, a lot of Blade Runner’s architecture is megastructural, but the overall look is one of layering – accretions built up over the decades. The existence of 'traditional' apartment buildings at ground level, for example, totally overshadowed by the ziggurat-like business district (some of which should be familiar), creates an overall impression of a termite mound-like colony. In stark contrast, new Beijing is all about newness, shiny surfaces and bold, individual statements (even if those statements aren't always welcomed by Chinese designers). Danwei also offers fascinating coverage on the explosion in China's magazine market. Link originally found at gulfstream.

Scanned archives of Transactor, an old (American?) computer magazine (via muxway) / big, bold ideas for London continue to be mooted: Bluebase is a new airport site at the Thames Gateway site / cathedrals in the air, one and two / pixel-perfect design fun at db-db / virtual snowglobes are all the rage - here's one from design organisation D&AD, instead of their usual dead-tree Christmas card / visit Disney'sHaunted Mansion.

The history of British roads at Apex Corner, including proposed London motorways, of which the Westway is the only built link. In retrospect, we can breathe a sigh of relief that the proposed Ringway was never constructed in its entirety. This re-drawn map of the North Cross Route shows a motorway ploughing its way through Camden and Islington to Hackney. As the site points out, one of the casualties would have been the Sigmund Freud Museum, swept away by asphalt. It's not as though the rest of the city would have escaped: the West Cross Route was to cut a swathe through Chelsea and Earl's Court. As the map shows, only a small section of this route was built, the M41. Apex Corner also has this excellent tube-style map London's motorways.

Mah-Jongg the ring-tailed lemur belonged to Stephen and Virginia Courtauld, eccentric owners of Eltham Palace. Read this fascinating 'alternative history' of the Palace, which posits that the entire building, a 1930s deco house built amongst the ruins and remains of a Tudor Palace, is riddled with secret rooms, trap doors and mystifying symbolism. Today, the lemur is little more than a marketing opportunity (yes, toy lemurs are available in the Palace store), but 'Jongy' was also a vital component of two very eccentric lives:

Jongy was infamous for biting people to whom he took a dislike. On the morning of the departure of the 1930-31 British Arctic Exhibition, sponsored by Stephen, the Courtaulds gave a farewell lunch on board their yacht, the Virginia; the expedition suffered a setback when Jongy bit the hand of Percy Lemon, the expedition’s wireless operator, severing an artery. Lemon turned out to be allergic to the iodine which was provided, and it took him three months to recover. (from the guide book)

A gallery of Stephen King book covers, via Old Timey. Quite an informative look at different illustrative approaches to the horror genre, or how a concept (e.g. The Dark Half) can be treated in multiple ways (and for different markets). Related: Wickedness.net, 'the on-line resource for exploring perspectives on evil and human wickedness'. Includes essays like 'And then came the Fall: on the nature of evil in J.R.R.Tolkien's and J.K.Rowling's arch-villains' (pdf).

The first grid blogging congress, [grid::brand], is up and running (we're slightly dancing around the edge of this experiment, what with being a week late into the fray). The inaugural discussion is brands (update). We'd like to offer the observation that brands are dead, dying, or at the very least, doomed to extinction.

The motor industry is an interesting example of how a manufacturing and innovation-driven industry became a brand-driven industry over the course of a decade or so. Given that each major company is essentially a portfolio of smaller brands (Ford, DaimlerChrysler, PSA, Renault-Nissan, General Motors, VW Group, etc.), the science of car design has become an exercise in decoding, distilling and bottling brand essence - the perceived qualities and characteristics that separate one car from another. Shared platforms and components are widespread within this most incestuous of industries, so it's unsurprising that product differentiation is of crucial importance.

So why does this mean that brands are dying? The brand is a distraction, a cypher - a non-existent thing. Instead, it's a collection of memories and expectations, applied - often incredibly skillfully - to a product. For a brand to be satisfying, it has to fulfill a consumer's expectations. Yet these expectations are constantly being manipulated through saturation advertising. things gets to spend quite a lot of time with car designers, for better or worse, and contradictions emerge.

There are two main paradoxes. The first is that branding is ultimately contrary to the manufacturing model of capitalism - that new products must always supersede existing products in some way in order to stimulate and accelerate demand. In contrast, branding is an evolutionary process, a slow accretion of ideas and opinions. Admittedly, evolutionary design can create a steady increase in demand, but rarely produces the exponential leaps and jumps that drive international capital.

For example, Audi have spent two decades hawking an ever-more refined image of modernism. Yet to take the company to another level, another image is needed; that of a more aggressive, sporting vehicle, partly to open up new markets and partly to differentiate from other VW Group brands (Volkswagen, SEAT, Skoda), who are all making supremely competent expressions of modern automotive design. Are they extending, or undermining, their brand? So should brands change to survive, and is this possible while they are simultaneously extolling solid, timeless values. It's a balancing act that can only become more paradoxical as brand values become more ingrained.

The other inconsistency, most especially within the motor industry, it to do with the changing attitude to design. Is design a means of expressing function, the creation of the very best packaging solution available. Or is it a means of triggering and reviving our mental associations with the product in question, be they regarding function, performance, heritage, luxury, practicality, whatever?

In this latter scenario, the brand becomes everything: a car is no longer an independent object, but a collection of elements intended first and foremost as cultural trigger points: a leather interior, a walnut dashboard, chrome trim, fancy lettering, bull bars, a curved flank, a radiator grille. These elements only have meaning when they are combined with our ingrained knowledge of the history of the manufacturer.

So why is the brand dead? Wait for the first no-brand, Muji-style automotive manufacturer as a sign that branding isn't the be all and end all of marketing and production. Ok, so Muji is itself a brand, albeit one predicated on the notion of anti-branding, but can an object as culturally loaded as a car be presented in a similar manner? The dislocation between reality and image, object and memory, thing and feeling, will ultimately set the brand free from the world of material goods. And then the brand will cease to exist.

In search of Bill Watterson, creator of Calvin and Hobbes. I have huge respect for people who are able to quit while they are ahead and maintain some kind of mystique about their life and work. ‘Creator Jim Davis has licensing agreements with 550 manufacturers in 111 countries, cranking out everything from coffee mugs to pajamas to battery-operated musical "Christmas fountains."’

Barcelona news. Jean Nouvel's Torre Agbar is coming along nicely, as is the Sagrada Familia, where construction is steaming ahead after a slowish decade. When completed, in twenty years or so, our guide told us that the apartment blocks immediately in front of the cathedral's new entrance will all be demolished. Irritating if you thought you'd got yourself set up with a really nice view. Related, a Barcelona gallery (not ours). Barcelona galleries: I, II, III, IV (old, but ours) / psychedelic flash by Larry Carlson / Mojave Airport Weblog, a fascinating insight into the world of 'boneyards,' aviation graveyards, private concept planes and the economics of global air travel (link via ffwd). Related: Mojo Jets provides vintage jets and helicopters to the film industry.

Finally, the other reason for the priority given to sending back colour TV images to earth is more macabre. It was to make certain that in the event of the moon becoming the astronaut's grave NASA was not relying totally on 16 mm film and still camera images, which would remain on the moon.

Retro futurism remains one of the web's favourite hobbies. Whether it's a site as slick as Retrolounge (with this link to transit posters of the 1920), or the sleazy pop culture celebrated at Retrocrush (1970s bathrooms, for example, or Diana Rigg photo galleries), we seemingly can't get enough of archived imagery. Why should this be? Visual ephemera blows away quickly, but there's always been a fascination with art and culture that manages to preserve and celebrate that which we've forgotten. The work of Richard Hamilton, the 'Merz' of KurtSchwitters, or just collage in general, seems to have a direct link with the website, an accumulation of material, filtered and sifted, yet necessarily presented in such a way as to demand further investigation. This explains our continuing fascination with online obsession - to take a random example, Tiny Pineapple's pineapple gallery, or, better still, their Nurse Book collection.

Delicious is a 'social bookmarks manager,' a 'make your own muxway' (which gives us the Traffic Cone Preservation Society). You'll need to know a bit about code to get it going (we don't, so we'll content ourselves with frequent visits to check the links. A similar kind of thing is offered at linkdump, but the anonymous link descriptors sometimes hide all manner of dubious things, like Kinky Breakout).

Amusing Ayn Rand-centric dating service (again, via me-fi). I’m not going to sign up to this just to get a laugh, though / satellite snooping at the Eyeballing Series, 'shining a light on sensitive places,' according to the Map Room, where we found this link. See Arnold’s house or the experimental laboratory at Porton Down in Wiltshire (mere miles from where I used to live). See also the splendid 3D maps at Biosphere 3D.